Photoshop How-To: Something's Fishy
Excerpted from Adobe Photoshop Master Class: Maggie Taylor’s Landscape of Dreams. Published by Peachpit Press.
Maggie Taylor is a digital artist with an unsual primary image source: a flatbed scanner. She uses Photoshop to combine odd bits of scanned ephemera, such as the museum postcard in the image below, with her own photographs. The end result is completely original and often hauntingly beautiful.

This photo is from a postcard showing a costume at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was Maggie’s starting point.

The final image is a long way from the antispetic original scan.
In this excerpt, you’ll learn how Maggie manipulated her source material to achieve the piece she calls “Twlighlt Swim.”
We’ve posted this excerpt as a PDF file. To open the PDF file in your Web browser, click “Swimming.” You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
To open the PDF, you’ll need a full version of Adobe Acrobat (5 or higher) or the Adobe Reader, which you can download here.
To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.
Excerpted from Adobe Photoshop Master Class: Maggie Taylor’s Landscape of Dreams by Amy Standen. Copyright © 2005. Used with the permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Peachpit Press.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on January 13, 2006
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